Upstream: Selected Essays

by Mary Oliver

In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be. Wordsworth studied himself and found the subject astonishing. Actually what he studied was his relationship to the harmonies and also the discords of the natural world. That’s what created the excitement.

And whoever thinks these are worthy, breathy words I am writing down is kind. Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion. Come with me into the field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here, and the sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them.

Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect.

Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple—or a green field—a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing—an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness—wonderful as that part of it is.

Adults can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them. Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing.

And this is what I learned: that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.

I did not think of language as the means to self-description. I thought of it as the door—a thousand opening doors!—past myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate, to praise, and, thus, to come into power.

I don’t mean it’s easy or assured; there are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet. But there is, also, the summoning world, the admirable energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating.

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart—to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.

The town’s clock cries out, and the face on every wrist hums or shines; the world keeps pace with itself. Another day is passing, a regular and ordinary day.

Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.

He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and even beautiful, but is not an artist. Such a person had better live with timely ambitions and finished work formed for the sparkle of the moment only. Such a person had better go off and fly an airplane.

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

But none of these elements does more than forward the real subject of Poe’s work, which is the anguish of knowing nothing for sure about the construct of the universe, or about the existence of a moral order within it—anything that would clarify its seemingly total and imperial indifference toward individual destiny.

A normal life includes the occasional black mood. But most of us have had some real enough experience with certainty, which helps us to sustain ourselves through passages of metaphysical gloom. While Poe had none. Not little, but none.

This lack disordered him. It is not a spiritual lack, but rather a lack of emotional organization, of confidence. And not self-confidence, which is already a complicated asset, but a lack of confidence in the world entire, and its benevolent as well as malevolent possibilities. In the deepest sense, Poe was without confidence in a future that might be different from the past. He was, forever, reliving an inescapable, original woe.

Said the poet Robert Frost, “We begin in infancy by establishing correspondence of eyes with eyes.”* It is deeply true. It is where the confidence comes from; the child whose gaze is met learns that the world is real, and desirable—that the child himself is real, and cherished.

Underneath its ropes and rats, its tensions and extraordinary machineries, “The Pit and the Pendulum” is the story of the soul struggling with the tortures of an indifferent universe. It is a tale of unmatchable horror—as it is equally a tale of all but unmatchable endurance. In the context of Poe’s work as a whole, both the “eternal night” and the narrator’s solitude are elements that make of the pit’s chamber an even more terrible tableau. In the blackness of the pit there is nothing—and no one. Not even the eye with the blue veil.

It is not hard to recognize Poe’s many narrators as a single sensibility, as one character, and to see this character as other than rational. He is a man of nervous temperament; he is capable of great love, loyalty, grief, of “wild excitement” (a recurring phrase); he owns a strange and unfettered imagination.

His enterprise is to challenge and dissolve a particular fact or circumstance that represents the natural order of things—specifically, death’s irreversibility. He therefore seeks to understand the world in a way that will disprove such circumstance. Discovering a “different” world assumes experiencing manifestations of that different world. To begin, then, it is necessary to disassociate from the world as it is ordinarily experienced. And not casually. He must unstring the universe to its farthest planet and star, and restring it in another way.

But the definitions of madness and rationality have been thrown here into the wind; in Poe’s stories, such states are uncertainly bordered areas in which, suddenly, ghosts walk. “Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence,” the narrator says in “Eleonora.”

Upon the wing of such pure or near madness, the effort toward re-visioning goes on. The mind deranged, by alcohol, opium or morphine, or insanity, sees a world differently from the sane and the sober—but, in fact, it does see a world.

Poe’s narrators drink furiously, and when they can get it, they take into their bodies the white powder opium; thus they lean, trembling, against the walls of ordinary perception. And thus, over and over, with “wild excitement,” they “swoon” out of this world.

To swoon is not only to pass from consciousness physically; it may also represent a willingness, even an eagerness, to experience unknown parts of life—obscure regions that might lead one toward a re-visioning.

What is certain in the rational realm is by no means certain in the kingdom of swoon. And though nothing in that dark kingdom is provable, neither can its nonexistence be proven. If nothing there is solid to the hand, it is solid enough to the mind, and upon that smallest beginning the need of the mind builds.

Sleep, too, is a kind of swooning out of this world.

Poe’s stories are—stories. Full of the hardware of the nightmare—graves, corpses, storms, moldering castles, catacombs—and hovering always at the edge of tension and incredulity, they never fail to thrill as stories.

But literature, the best of it, does not aim to be literature. It wants and strives, beyond that artifact part of itself, to be a true part of the composite human record—that is, not words but a reality.

never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen. In the wide circles of timelessness, everything material and temporal will fail, including the manifestation of the beloved.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

mystical states “are illuminations, revelations . . . and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after time”; that such a state “cannot be sustained for long”; and that the mystic feels “as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.”

His message was clear from the first and never changed: that a better, richer life is available to us, and with all his force he advocated it both for the good of each individual soul and for the good of the universe.

And Leaves of Grass is indeed a sermon, a manifesto, a utopian document, a social contract, a political statement, an invitation, to each of us, to change. All through the poem we feel Whitman’s persuading force, which is his sincerity; and we feel what the poem tries continually to be: the replication of a miracle.

And what is that great labor? Out-circling interest, sympathy, empathy, transference of focus from the self to all else; the merging of the lonely single self with the wondrous, never-lonely entirety. This is all. The rest is literature: words, words, words; example, metaphor, narrative, lyricism, sweetness, persuasion, the stress of rhetoric, the weight of catalog.

He was after a joyfulness, a belief in existence in which man’s inner light is neither rare nor elite, but godly and common, and acknowledged. For that it was necessary to be rooted, again, in the world.

To be surrounded by beautiful curious breathing laughing flesh is enough, To pass among them . . . to touch any one . . . to rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment . . . what is this then? I do not ask any more delight . . . I swim in it as in a sea.

Of all American poems, the 1855 Leaves of Grass is the most probable of effect upon the individual sensibility. It wants no less. We study it as literature, but like all great literature it has a deeper design: it would be a book for men to live by.

There is a rumor of total welcome among the frosts of the winter morning. Beauty has its purposes, which, all our lives and at every season, it is our opportunity, and our joy, to divine. Nothing outside ourselves makes us desire to do so; the questions, and the striving toward answers, come from within.

And now: enough of silver, behold the pink, even a vague, unsurpassable flush of pale green. It is the performance of this hour only, the dawning of the day, fresh and ever new. This is to say nothing against afternoons, evenings, or even midnight. Each has its portion of the spectacular. But dawn—dawn is a gift. Much is revealed about a person by his or her passion, or indifference, to this opening of the door of day. No one who loves dawn, and is abroad to see it, could be a stranger to me.

The beauty and strangeness of the world may fill the eyes with its cordial refreshment. Equally it may offer the heart a dish of terror. On one side is radiance; on another is the abyss.

But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus. The world is not what I thought, but different, and more! I have seen it with my own eyes!

At the same time he was gaining in attentiveness and eating more than sufficiently, he was growing weaker. The wing wound had dried, but the second foot had now begun to wither. He shook his shoulders less and less during his bath. The neck was still strong, the head lightly uplifted and arched, quick and nimble. He was no less ready to play. But, always, he was a little weaker. And so he was in an impossible place. And we were more and more in a difficult place. How do I say it? We grew fond. We grew into that perilous place: we grew fond.

He was, of course, a piece of the sky. His eyes said so. This is not fact; this is the other part of knowing something, when there is no proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief. Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it filled not with darkness but with light. Bird was like that. Startling, elegant, alive.

And I can imagine sitting quietly before that luminous wanderer the snowy owl, and learning, from the white gleam of its feathers, something about the arctic. But the great horned I can’t imagine in any such proximity—if one of those should touch me, it would touch to the center of my life, and I must fall. They are the pure wild hunters of our world.

When I hear it resounding through the woods, and then the five black pellets of its song dropping like stones into the air, I know I am standing at the edge of the mystery, in which terror is naturally and abundantly part of life, part of even the most becalmed, intelligent, sunny life—as, for example, my own. The world where the owl is endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt is the world in which I live too. There is only one world.

All summer they are red and pink and white tents of softness and nectar, which wafts and hangs everywhere—a sweetness so palpable and excessive that, before it, I’m struck, I’m taken, I’m conquered; I’m washed into it, as though it was a river, full of dreaming and idleness—I drop to the sand, I can’t move; I am restless no more; I am replete, supine, finished, filled to the last edges with an immobilizing happiness. And is this not also terrible? Is this not also frightening?

Let the mind be teased by such stretches of the imagination, by such balance. Now I am cringing at the very sound of the owl’s dark wings opening over my head—not long ago I could do nothing but lounge on the sand and stare into the cities of the roses.

The caught crow is a dead crow. But it is not in the nature of crows to hide or cower—it is in their nature to gather and to screech and to gamble in the very tree where death stares at them with molten eyes. What fun, to aggravate the old bomber! What joy, to swipe at the tawny feathers even as the bird puffs and hulks and hisses.

Dear Bear, it’s no use, the world is like that. So stay where you are, and live long. Someday maybe we’ll wise up and remember what you were: hopeless ambassador of a world that returns now only in poets’ dreams.